Prehistoric Materialities

Becoming Material in Prehistoric Britain and Ireland

Andrew Meirion Jones

Includes detailed case studies which will prove to be essential reading for those interested in the prehistoric archaeology of Britain and Ireland

A multidisciplinary approach to the discussions

Illustrated throughout and includes 8 pages of colour plates

Prehistoric Materialities

Becoming Material in Prehistoric Britain and Ireland

Andrew Meirion Jones

Description

Humans occupy a material environment that is constantly changing. Yet in the twentieth century archaeologists studying British prehistory have overlooked this fact in their search for past systems of order and pattern. Artefacts and monuments were treated as inert materials which were the outcomes of social ideas and processes. As a result materials were variously characterized as stable entities such as artefact categories, styles or symbols in an attempt to comprehend them. In this book Jones argues that, on the contrary, materials are vital, mutable, and creative, and archaeologists need to attend to the changing character of materials if they are to understand how past people and materials intersected to produce prehistoric societies. Rather than considering materials and societies as given, he argues that we need to understand how these entities are performed.

Jones analyses the various aspects of materials, including their scale, colour, fragmentation, and assembly, in a wide-ranging discussion that covers the pottery, metalwork, rock art, passage tombs, barrows, causewayed enclosures, and settlements of Neolithic and Early Bronze Age Britain and Ireland.

Prehistoric Materialities

Becoming Material in Prehistoric Britain and Ireland

Andrew Meirion Jones

Author Information

Andrew Jones is a Reader in Prehistoric Archaeology at the University of Southampton. He is the author of Archaeological Theory and Scientific Practice (2002), Memory and Material Culture (2007), editor of Prehistoric Europe: Theory and Practice (2008), and co-editor ,with G. Macgregor, of Colouring the Past (2002).